LITMIR.BIZ

      Who else but us will remember our presence in the Pope’s palace, when, chance visitors, we strolled from hall to hall, from one floor to another, witnessed only by the secret eyes of the ancient stone walls newly uncovered by restorers? Yes, stones can see, but it takes them long to learn how.

      In the streets of Avignon – a poor village compared to Rome even though stubbornly electing its own pontiffs – cattle both large and small loiter in the day, while at night lurk restless gangs of medieval lads. In the echoing halls of the palace, its bedrooms and corridors, trail vile intrigues and the smell of death, mingling with smells of cooking as smoky aromas fill the lofty refectory from the spit-roasting of a lamb the size of a small bull. Aromas of death still linger secretly in the palace chambers where the mistral can’t reach, where lived and died the first Avignon pope, Clement V – who tried to unite Europe with a new crusade against the Saracens and met his demise after treating indigestion with crushed emeralds; who outlawed the Knights Templar and blessed their brutal execution; who smiles at us from a dark corner with his public smile, since he went down in history as a pious, placid and pleasant priest, and there must be some truth in the reports.

      Accompanied by that unsettling smile, we escaped the Pope’s chamber, recognizing that it was locked up in time – a time not ours.

      And outside, the mistral was blowing, the wind that drives people mad, that confuses the mind of even the toughest husband, by blowing out from the soul and from the heart the dusk of self-possessed pride.

      The mistral blew, filling up the sunny spaces of autumn with the ghosts and memories of things unhappened, unhappened because everything that truly was, was different from how we imagined.

      The mistral blew, turning the heads of northerners and driving Van Gogh crazy in canvases of scarlet vineyards and twisted cypresses near Arles, yet invigorating the mind of Cézanne who, as it turns out, did not invent, but precisely impressed with his brush the motley, smoky scene around Mont St Victoire. That is what Provence is, with its Aix, its Arles, its Avignon and Marseilles, and its vivid blue calanques that gnaw the rocky coast, overgrown by the stone-pines of the infinite imagination.

      A human being – seeks to justify his being and his wanderings through life. A human being – understands that his brief stay within nature and geography is like the existence of a leaf that once quivers on a plane-tree branch then is carried off by the wind in an unknown direction, and there’s no human being whose existence is fixed like a stone.

      Everything that happens, happens inside the soul. Only the soul can sense invisible connections that slip away unnoticed from so much knowledge. But the soul can slumber, or shiver in fear, and only earthly love and God’s mistral can help it see and comprehend how everything in the world is interconnected – even those things that seem utterly disparate.

      Yet do they really understand this, these chance observers, these frequent trippers, these earnest tourists in Avignon and Turin, the Holy Land and Sinai, where a wily Bedouin, wrapped in a keffiyeh, gives them a ride on his asthmatic camel to the monastery of St Catherine which holds behind its stone walls Moses’s ‘burning bush’, the first images of Christ and an original handprint of the Holy Prophet of Islam. The only thing they’ll really remember is the camel ride, because they paid for the ride. Only very rarely will one of this mixed crew look up and feel with the trembling heart that they all, so different, are inextricably connected to each other by the common air of the world, our one atmosphere, that looks from space like a soft blue haze above this planet of people in which each of who, you must remember, Mozart is killed …

      People, people, nameless as the wandering clouds that shine so brightly in the heights of love above other spaces where live the northern, the sick, the grieving, the Russian – spaces for long uninhabited and careless in their vacancy, spaces where now and forever reverberates the chaos of shrieking hatred and its strident echo: the unctuous teaching of lies.

      And in these spaces, vanquished people, tired of passive flesh and of the heart that alone can vanquish the fear of death in life – this is what it comes to.

      Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

      L’on y danse, l’on y danse

      Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

      L’on y danse tous en rond

      Any river has two banks and the wind blows above each. And what can we do if we do not dance on the bridge that leads to nowhere but to and fro – dance like the dessicated plane-tree leaves whisked through Avignon’s cobbled strets, dance like the mistral – and smile to your beloved, and try not to think but to live ….

      I could walk straight down from my house to the abandoned tunnel, but I chose other paths. If you go right, say, after just five minutes, you find yourself on a meandering track, curling through the twittering of goldfinches and the fluting of red-breasted robins, between young hornbeams and ash trees entwined with mistletoe and honeysuckle, past early spring flowers – pale bluebells, anemones white as ivory, anemones like tiny stars peeping from the tangled grass, violas and foxgloves – digitales with their fleshy, geranium-like leaves and crimson bell-shaped blooms.

      You can then climb up to a Cedar of Lebanon, so ancient and tall, that spreads a tent so broad and dense that nothing grows beneath, not even the most tenacious bramble. In this bare space, exposed sandstone is blanketed in fallen needles.

      In the thick base of this great cedar, nestling deeply into its tough bole and knotted sinews, is set a bench for contemplating the dark pond below, a pond which even in spring is short of water. So this place is not a happy place, but filled with melancholy, like any place that does not fulfil its purpose. At first, I came here often to sit on the bench and think, but the sight of the exposed mudslime and seeps of the pond bed brought only dreary thoughts, so I gave up draining my imagination and heart here, along with the duckweed and water fern – and followed other paths through the wood and found other benches, some set up in memory of English people who had loved these places when they were alive. On the copper plates screwed to the bench, I read Gus Berger, Phillip Heath, Brian Seymour …

      Then the path winds further on, under the shady canopy with its flashes of sunlight, past constellations of snowdrops and wild garlic with their lanced leaves, past blackberry and raspberry bushes, and ferns with fronds still curled in yellow spirals like a bishop’s mitre, and then after a while emerging past what seems like a ruined chapel where rocks fused into a gothic arch.

      And everywhere in the gloom of the trail beneath the trees, it seemed to me there beckoned the deceptive scent of bird-cherry blossom. I looked for it with my eyes, but it wasn’t there – only the faint scent, bitter, brusque but beloved, drifting past – but where from?

      Maybe it was the mingling of moist morning air and whiff of muddy puddles with the fragrant bouquet of flower scents – the pinky froth of hawthorn, fluffy rosettes of rowan blossom, golden showers of meadowsweet, subtle jasmine, wild garlic and lily-of-the-valley invisible amid the grass. Maybe they all conspired to compose for me that longed for breath of pure happiness.

      Gus Berger, Phillip Heath, Brian Seymour (vanished descendants of the Victorian imperial era), Cedar of Lebanon and artificial ponds with small oak islands, wide, grassy banks with bluebells and angelica, dandelions and fireweed and thistles, and English birch trees and may alders with their sticky seedpods primed to fluff up and fly over the glades where are bedded lungworts (pink but turning purple), glades which, after the moist gloom under trees … all of these suddenly stir a marvellous thought in the passerby’s mind: this isn’t just for me to wonder at snow-plumed and pink starry flowers, nor even to foster my contact with the Unity, but for those working hard on the Earth – for Gus Berger, Phillip Heath and Brian Seymour, the walkers of the many

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